The Galerie Médicis of the Louvre houses the complete series of paintings on the life of Marie de’ Medici by Peter Paul Rubens, one of the greatest painters of his time. Marie de’ Medici was the widow of King Henri IV and mother of King Louis XIII, with whom she had a shaky relationship. When the queen commissioned these paintings in 1622, she was just returning from several years of exile, forced upon her by none other than her own son.

Hailing from Florence, Marie had the Luxembourg palace built in Paris using the Palazzo Pitti as a model. The queen was trying to recreate the sumptuous Florentine palaces of her childhood. She decided to decorate two large galleries of her new palace with paintings that depicted her life and that of her royal husband. For that, she turned to the great master, Peter Paul Rubens, who created for her the first great sequence of paintings celebrating monarchy of the Baroque age.

Our lecture will focus on the Queen’s story and the extremely clever, often humorous, manner in which Rubens interprets the key episodes of the Queen’s life, flatters the Queen and glosses over the more embarrassing aspects of her turbulent career.